This paper provides a rare glimpse into the overall approach for the refinement, i.e. the enrichment of scanned historical newspapers with text and layout recognition, in the Europeana Newspapers project. Within three years, the project processed more than 10 million pages of historical newspapers from 12 national and major libraries to produce the largest open access and fully searchable text collection of digital historical newspapers in Europe. In this, a wide variety of legal, logistical, technical and other challenges were encountered. After introducing the background issues in newspaper digitization in Europe, the paper discusses the technical aspects of refinement in greater detail. It explains what decisions were taken in the design of the large-scale processing workflow to address these challenges, what were the results produced and what were identified as best practices.

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The paper will describe how web-based collaboration tools can engage users in the building of historical printed text resources created by mass digitisation projects. The drivers for developing such tools will be presented, identifying the benefits that can be derived for both the user community and cultural heritage institutions. The perceived risks, such as new errors introduced by the users, and the limitations of engaging with users in this way will be set out with the lessons that can be learned from existing activities, such as the National Library of Australia's newspaper website which supports collaborative correction of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) output.The paper will present the work of the IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) project, a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission as part of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). One of the aims of the project is to develop tools that help improve OCR results for historical printed texts, specifically those works published before the industrial production of books from the middle of the 19th century.Technological improvements to image processing and OCR engine technology are vital to improving access to historic text, but engaging the user community also has an important role to play. Utilising the intended user can help achieve the levels of accuracy currently found in born-digital materials. Improving OCR results will User Collaboration for Improving Access to Historical Texts 120Liber Quarterly Volume 20 Issue 1 2010 allow for better resource discovery and enhance performance by text mining and accessibility tools. The IMPACT project will specifically develop a tool that supports collaborative correction and validation of OCR results and a tool to allow user involvement in building historical dictionaries which can be used to validate word recognition. The technologies use the characteristics of human perception as a basis for error detection.

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The paper presents a novel web-based platform for experimental workflow development in historical document digitisation and analysis. The platform has been developed as part of the IMPACT project, providing a range of tools and services for transforming physical documents into digital resources. It explains the main drivers in developing the technical framework and its architecture, how and by whom it can be used and presents some initial results. The main idea lies in setting up an interoperable and distributed infrastructure based on loose coupling of tools via web services that are wrapped in modular workflow templates which can be executed, combined and evaluated in many different ways. As the workflows are registered through a Web 2.0 environment, which is integrated with a workflow management system, users can easily discover, share, rate and tag workflows and thereby support the building of capacity across the whole community. Where ground truth is available, the workflow templates can also be used to compare and evaluate new methods in a transparent and flexible way.